page_title: Ukiyo-e
section_title: Style
hierarchical_section_title: Ukiyo-e / Style
caption_attribution_description: English: Crop of ukiyo-e print Woman Visiting the Shrine in the Night by Suzuki Harunobu
context_page_description: Ukiyo-e is a genre of Japanese art which flourished from the 17th through 19th centuries. Its artists produced woodblock prints and paintings of such subjects as female beauties; kabuki actors and sumo wrestlers; scenes from history and folk tales; travel scenes and landscapes; flora and fauna; and erotica. The term ukiyo-e translates as "picture[s] of the floating world".
  Edo became the seat of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 17th century. The merchant class at the bottom of the social order, which benefited the most from city's rapid economic growth, began to indulge in the entertainments of kabuki theatre, geisha, and courtesans of the pleasure districts; the term ukiyo came to describe this hedonistic lifestyle. Printed or painted ukiyo-e works emerged in the late 17th century and were popular with the merchant class, who had become wealthy enough to afford to decorate their homes with them.
  The earliest ukiyo-e works emerged in the 1670s with Moronobu's paintings and monochromatic prints of beautiful women. Colour in prints came gradually—at first only added by hand for special commissions.
context_section_description: Early ukiyo-e artists brought with them a sophisticated knowledge of and training in the composition principles of classical Chinese painting; gradually these artists shed the overt Chinese influence to develop a native Japanese idiom.  The early ukiyo-e artists have been called "Primitives" in the sense that the print medium was a new challenge to which they adapted these centuries-old techniques—their image designs are not considered "primitive".  Many ukiyo-e artists received training from teachers of the Kanō and other painterly schools.
  A defining feature of most ukiyo-e prints is a well-defined, bold, flat line.  The earliest prints were monochromatic, and these lines were the only printed element; even with the advent of colour this characteristic line continued to dominate.  In ukiyo-e composition forms are arranged in flat spaces with figures typically in a single plane of depth.  Attention was drawn to vertical and horizontal relationships, as well as details such as lines, shapes, and patterns such as those on clothing.  Compositions were often asymmetrical, and the viewpoint was often from unusual angles, such as from above.  Elements of images were often cropped, giving the composition a spontaneous feel.  In colour prints, contours of most colour areas are sharply defined, usually by the linework.  The aesthetic of flat areas of colour contrasts with the modulated colours expected in Western traditions and with other prominent contemporary traditions in Japanese art patronized by the upper class, such as in the subtle monochrome ink brushstrokes of zenga brush painting or tonal colours of the Kanō school of painting.
  The colourful, ostentatious, and complex patterns, concern with changing fashions, and tense, dynamic poses and compositions in ukiyo-e are in striking contrast with many concepts in traditional Japanese aesthetics.  Prominent amongst these, wabi-sabi favours simplicity, asymmetry, and imperfection, with evidence of the passage of time; and shibui values subtlety, humility, and restraint.  Ukiyo-e can be less at odds with aesthetic concepts such as the racy, urbane stylishness of iki.
  Ukiyo-e displays an unusual approach to graphical perspective, one that can appear underdeveloped when compared to European paintings of the same period.  Western-style geometrical perspective was known in Japan—practised most prominently by the Akita ranga painters of the 1770s—as were Chinese methods to create a sense of depth using a homogeny of parallel lines.  The techniques sometimes appeared together in ukiyo-e works, geometrical perspective providing an illusion of depth in the background and the more expressive Chinese perspective in the fore.  The techniques were most likely learned at first through Chinese Western-style paintings rather than directly from Western works.  Long after becoming familiar with these techniques, artists continued to harmonize them with traditional methods according to their compositional and expressive needs.  Other ways of indicating depth included the Chinese tripartite composition method used in Buddhist pictures, where a large form is placed in the foreground, a smaller in the midground, and yet a smaller in the background; this can be seen in Hokusai's Great Wave, with a large boat in the foreground, a smaller behind it, and a small Mt Fuji behind them.
  There was a tendency since early ukiyo-e to pose beauties in what art historian Midori Wakakura called a "serpentine posture", which involves the subjects' bodies twisting unnaturally while facing behind themselves.  Art historian Motoaki Kōno posited that this had its roots in traditional buyō dance; Haruo Suwa countered that the poses were artistic licence taken by ukiyo-e artists, causing a seemingly relaxed pose to reach unnatural or impossible physical extremes.  This remained the case even when realistic perspective techniques were applied to other sections of the composition.
caption: Woman Visiting the Shrine in the Night, Harunobu, 17th century. Bold, flat lines define and contain areas of flat colour.
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